My main research interests are phonology, prosody, verse metrics, historical linguistics and morphology.

Prosody and morphology

In Swedish, prosody plays an important role in morphological structure. Many morphemes are lexically specified for prosodic information. They may be stressed (tonic), or require to be next to a stressed syllable (posttonic, pretonic). These properties determine how morphemes can combine with each other, to some extent. I've written about this in the monograph Prosodin i svenskans morfologi (2015, Morfem förlag) and in the article Culminativity, stress and tone accent in Central Swedish (Lingua 2012). Prosodic morphology is also important in nickname formation, cf. Svensk smeknamnsfonologi (2002) and Smeknamnet är redan givet (Språktidningen 2016).

Prosody and verse metrics

Verse metrics is usually described in other terms than the prosodic ones, but there is much to gain from looking at meter from a prosodic, linguistic perspective. My general approach to meter is to try and reduce as much as possible to regular grammar. The fact that grammar (phonology) is involved is obvious already in the observation that the metrics used in a language always has to obey the phonology of the language. A recent contribution in this area is The phonology of Tashlhiyt Berber songs (NLLT 2016). Other works include The phonology of Greek meter (with Chris Golston, Linguistics 2005), Accents left and right (2009) and Sköna och osköna ljud i skönlitteraturen (2013).

Prosody and language history

I first started out in this are as a graduate student. My doctoral dissertation, Structures in Germanic prosody (1992), is a reconstruction of the stress system at various stages of the Germanic language history and the sound changes that are prosodically motivated.

After finishing my PhD, I started working on the tone accent distinction that is characteristic of Swedish and Norwegian. This work resulted in a number of articles concerning the origin of accents in North Germanic and their historical development: The origin of Scandinavian tone accents (Diachronica 1998), Historien om tonaccenten (2005), and also a couple of articles regarding the origin of Danish stød and how it relates to the tone accent systems: Origin of Danish stød 2000a, Stöten som aldrig blev av 2000b.

I have also worked on the typology of tone accent, that is, how the various dialects realize the tone accent distinction. The tone accents is the main feature used to divide Swedish and Norwegian into major dialect areas (Remarks on the Scandinavian accent typology 1998, Scandinavian accent typology, STUF 2006, The phonological typology of North Germanic accent, in press).

Phonology

I am the author of the monograph The phonology of Swedish (2014, Oxford University Press). In that book I go over the segmental and prosodic properties of the language. I've also written a couple of compendia for students on this subject: Svenskt fonologikompendium (1997) and Artikulatorisk fonetik och fonologi (2002, revised 2014).

Morphology

Within morphology proper, I have written the article Den dära och sånt därnt (2006) in the Festschrift for Staffan Hellberg (my advisor), and the compendium Ordbetydelser (2004). A book, Prosodin i svenskans morfologi (2015) combines phonology and morphology and concerns the formal side of morphology, which, I argue, is largely determined by prosody in Swedish.

epresentation of stress in the brain 

I have participated in a couple of brain studies based on my hypothesis (Allting ryms i varje frö, 1999) of a contrast between lexical stress (memorized) and phonologically assigned stress. These studies, both of which support the hypothesis, have Hatice Zora as main author: Lexical Specification of Prosodic Information in Swedish: Evidence from Mismatch Negativity (2016) and Prosodically controlled derivations in the mental lexicon (2019).